Adding Content Killed My Sales (Money Article Optimization)

About two weeks ago I decided to update one of my money making articles, titled "Best 10 X". It ended up being around 1600 words, and the extra content pushed the products down a bit from the very beginning of the article. It was some bad money article optimization on my part.

It ranks number one on google and continued to receive the same amount of traffic as it was previously getting. However, the biggest change was the amount of clicks on my amazon affiliate links.​

They dropped by around 30% and I definitely took a hit for about a week until I noticed what I did wrong.

Let this be a lesson to everyone, that although google does like fresh and updated content on a blog, you have got to be real careful when it comes to your money posts.

About 3 days into this mistake, I realized what I had done and quickly evaluated the article. I took all the new content that was added and pushed it below the list of best products. The content that didn't make sense without being at the top was removed, but besides that, I managed to maintain the new word count of around 1500 and ensured that the content was "fresh".​

Having fresh content and the article updated was the main reason that I increased the word count, otherwise it would slowly drift down the ranks.​

Money Article Optimization

Just a couple days later, the clicks on my amazon affiliate links came back up, and I checked the product positioning or affiliate links on all the other money articles. Just as I expected, they weren't optimized for getting clicks. The product list was in the middle, and the beginning was just fluff.

By shifting the product list to the top, I managed to increase the affiliate clicks on my niche site by almost 20%.

Here are some of the steps I took for my money article optimization.​

Shift the Products to the top!

A/B Test the Button Text

Short product descriptions (pros and cons)

No prices!

From now on, I will be carefully updating my money articles, and dish out 3000 word blog posts on new topics.

In addition, I have started recording daily on Anchor and put out a massive post titled Guide to Anchor App.

Let me know what you have been doing to optimize your money articles​.